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Perry Stein

Perry is a News Writer for Talking Points Memo based in Washington D.C. Prior to TPM, she was a reporter-research at The New Republic and worked for her hometown paper, The Miami Herald. Perry can be reached at perry@talkingpointsmemo.com.

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The Washington Post's new owner, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos, said in a letter to the newspaper's staff that he would not be leading the day-to-day operations at the paper as he is already "happily living in 'the other Washington' where I have a day job that I love."

"Besides," he added, "the Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I’m extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on."

"So, let me start with something critical," Bezos continued. "The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we’ll work hard not to make mistakes. When we do, we will own up to them quickly and completely."

Washington Post. Co. will sell its flagship newspaper, The Washington Post, and affiliated publications to Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for $250 million, the Post announced Monday.

“The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future. But we wanted to do more than survive," said Donald Graham, the Post Co.’s chief executive, whose family has owned the paper for four generations. "I’m not saying this guarantees success but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

The sale will likely be completed with Bezos as the sole owner within 60 days.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate and state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) urged Gov. Bob McDonnell Monday to call a special legislative session to address "severe holes" in the state's ethics laws--an issue that has plagued both Republicans the last few months.

“Trust is something that is easy to lose and hard to recover,” Cuccinelli said in an interview with The Washington Post after a meeting with McDonnell. “I think the longer we let this go, the more difficult it is for Virginians to achieve the level of faith in their government that I think they’re accustomed to. And I think that’s something we can achieve if we move quickly."

Federal and state investigators are currently looking into the connection between McDonnell and Jonnie Williams Sr., CEO of nutritional supplement company Star Scientific and a wealthy McDonnell donor, who has given the governor's family various pricey gifts.

Cuccinelli also received $18,000 worth of gifts from Williams, failing to initially disclose $4,500 worth of items including significant stock in the company, which he attributed to an oversight, according to the Post.

Update: A spokesperson for McDonnell told NBC12 that the governor would not be calling a special session to address ethics laws.

"The Governor was informed of the Attorney General's position on this matter, spokesman Tucker Martin told NBC12. "However, he believes the proper time and place for the consideration of such changes would be during the next session of the General Assembly, which begins in January."

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) will once again greet President Barack Obama on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport ahead of a speech on the economy and housing Tuesday, according to The Republic.

The governor plans to speak to the president about getting the area of the Yarnell Hill fire to be declared a federal disaster, a spokesperson told the paper.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday that the Department of Justice is "looking into" some of the issues raised by a Reuters report revealing that a secret unit within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration "is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans."

Democratic Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, who mounted a 13-hour filibuster against a stringent abortion bill earlier this year, said Monday that she will run for one of two offices: her current state Senate seat, or Texas governor.

"I can say with absolute certainty that I will run for one of two offices. Either my state Senate seat or the governor," she said at the National Press Club in Washington D.C.

Gearing up for his 2014 reelection campaign, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is launching a new purge of Florida's voting rolls in an attempt to sift out any potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in the state.

A similar effort last year was filled with errors, found few ineligible voters and prompted lawsuits by advocacy groups that argued the purge disproportionately targeted minority groups, according to the Miami Herald. Florida's list of registered voters suspected of not being U.S. citizens shrank from 182,000 to 2,600 to 198 before the 2012 election.

“It was sloppy, it was slapdash and it was inaccurate,” Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards told the Herald. “They were sending us names of people to remove because they were born in Puerto Rico. It was disgusting.”

Secretary of State Ken Detzner, Florida's top election official, is creating a new list of suspected noncitizen voters by cross-checking state voter data with a the Department of Homeland Security's federal database, the Miami Herald reported.

Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the underdog in the Aug. 13 New Jersey Democratic Senate primary against Newark Mayor Cory Booker, will release his first television ad of the campaign Tuesday, painting himself as the true "progressive" candidate in the race.

"I approved this message because Cory Booker may be the frontrunner in this race, but he's no progressive," he says at the end.

The ad is running in the New York and Philadelphia markets between Aug. 6 and Aug. 13.

Former Homeland Security Secretary under President George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff, said Sunday that the splintered al Qaeda that exists today is "more dangerous" than the core al Qaeda of 15 years ago.

"In many way it's more dangerous, because now we have what I call 2.0 or 3.0, which is widely dispersed, a younger generation coming up with new ideas, not necessarily repeating what did in the past," Chertoff said on ABC's "This Week." "And we now see them all the way from West Africa into South Asia. And so there's a much broader battlefield."